Marisha Pessl biography

Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl Biography

Marisha Pessl, the author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics was born on October 26, 1977 in Clarkston, Michigan. Her mother,
Anne, a schoolteacher, was raised in Brazil and Venezuela, and her Austrian
father was a mechanical engineer for General Motors. Her parents divorced when
she was three and she and her sister, Elke (named after Elke Sommer) were
brought up by her mother, visiting her father in Austria once or twice a year. When she was three her family moved to Asheville in Western
North Carolina. According to her publisher's bio, as a middle and high
school student she had "more extracurricular activities than Imelda Marcos had
shoes", including horseback riding, ballet, tap-dancing and jazz lessons,
community theater, drawing and painting classes, music and voice lessons, and
tutors for Math and French - despite all of this enrichment "she really just
wished she were cheerleading".

For 17 years, her mother read aloud to Marisha and Elke every night before bed,
covering "a fair chunk of the Western canon". On leaving school she
studied film production at Northwestern University in Chicago, before
transferring to Barnard College at Columbia University as a Junior, from where
she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English
Literature and a minor in playwriting.

In 2001 she started to write in her free time while continuing her day job as a
financial consultant in the Mergers & Acquisitions group of Price Waterhouse
Coopers. Then her boyfriend (who she married in 2003) moved to
London, and she went too, which gave her the opportunity to write full-time
She created spreadsheets for her characters, carefully laying out the clues and
refusing to show the manuscript to anyone (she says that she hates criticism).
She finished in 2004 and sent a letter to Jonathan Franzen's agent, Susan Golomb, writing "It is a first novel
unlike any you will read this year .... a funny, encyclopedic and wildly
ambitious literary tale about love and loss, youth and yearning, treachery and
terror." Susan Golomb was convinced, and not long after sold the rights
for "6-figures" (the exact sum Pessl correctly refuses to name) at auction.

She and her husband lived in a loft in the Tribeca area of New York.
When asked why she chose to write a mystery she replies, "I love the circuitous
routes a character has to take to find the truth, and surprise endings."

This bio was last updated on 05/30/2016. We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's a tough task. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date or inaccurate, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors: If you wish to make changes to your bio, send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we can replace the old with the new.

Interview

A Conversation with Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is your first novel. What was the inspiration for this very original story? How and when did you begin writing it?
I began the book when I was twenty-four and, until I moved to London, lived something of a double life working as a financial consultant during the day and writing at night, sometimes all night. Given my tendency to fall asleep at my desk, my dazed and often nonsensical answers to my bosss questions, I do think my coworkers suspected I was up to somethingbut were too afraid to ask what it was!

In terms of a germinating idea, I began with characterBlues voice first, then Gareth, the dynamic of father and daughter. Where I grew up in North Carolina, many children were home schooled, and I always found that so unusual and mysterious: what it would be like to have your parent quite literally your teacher, how powerful yet isolating it might be. On one hand, to have a gifted, multilingual professor tutoring you privately every day would be tremendous; intellectually youd be leaps and bounds ahead of the other students. And yet youd miss out on that very American,
Sixteen Candles schooling: the cliques, the ...

Readalikes

All the books below are recommended as readalikes for Marisha Pessl but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose readalikes

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, and grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec, and in Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree ...
(more)

Kelly Braffet is the author of Josie and Jack, Last Seen Leaving and Save Yourself. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, where she received her MFA. Kelly lives in upstate New York with her ...
(more)

Books that entertain, engage & enlighten

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends books that we believe to be best in class. Books that will whisk you to faraway places and times, that will expand your mind and challenge you -- the kinds of books you just can't wait to tell your friends about.

Newsletter

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info & giveaways by email.